A lawful permanent resident from Peru is in ICE custody after admitting she falsely claimed U.S. citizenship to cast a ballot in the November 2024 presidential election in Sedgwick County, Kansas.
Mariana Alexandra Dewey, a Peruvian national, was taken into custody on September 1 at a Wichita residence. She had already pleaded guilty to disorderly election conduct under Kansas law before federal immigration authorities moved in, the Daily Caller reported.
The case marks another concrete enforcement action in the Trump administration's broader push to identify and prosecute noncitizens who cast ballots in American elections. It also lands in the middle of a heated legal fight over whether federal authorities should have access to citizenship databases to verify voter rolls before Election Day, not just catch violations after the fact.
Dewey submitted a Kansas voter registration application in which she certified, under penalty of perjury, that she was a United States citizen. She was not. As a lawful permanent resident, she held a green card but lacked the citizenship required to register or vote in any federal or state election.
On November 5, 2024, she cast a provisional ballot in the general election in Sedgwick County. Provisional ballots are typically used when a voter's eligibility cannot be confirmed at the polling place. Election officials later flagged the discrepancy.
Dewey pleaded guilty to disorderly election conduct, a state charge under Kansas law. That guilty plea preceded her transfer to ICE custody, meaning the state criminal process and the federal immigration enforcement action ran on parallel tracks.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not treat the case as a minor paperwork violation. In a statement tied to the arrest, Mullin cast noncitizen voting as a direct assault on the franchise of every lawful American voter.
"If even one noncitizen votes, that steals the voice of a U.S. citizen."
Mullin went further in a second statement, tying the enforcement action to the principle that voting is reserved exclusively for citizens. Fox News reported his full remarks framing the arrest as part of a pattern the administration intends to pursue aggressively.
"This alien violated the sacred right of every American citizen."
The language signals that DHS views these cases not as isolated incidents but as test cases for a broader enforcement posture. The administration has cited similar cases elsewhere as justification for expanded tools to detect noncitizen registrations before ballots are cast, not just after.
Dewey's arrest did not happen in a vacuum. The Trump administration has been waging a parallel legal battle to gain access to DHS citizenship records so that states can cross-reference voter rolls against immigration databases. That effort has met resistance in federal court.
A Biden-appointed judge blocked DHS from sharing its citizenship database after more than 67 million voter records had already been scanned. The ruling cut off a tool that states had begun using to flag potentially ineligible registrants.
The administration responded by escalating. The Trump DOJ asked the Supreme Court to revive access to the database, arguing that the lower court's injunction left states blind to noncitizen registrations that could be caught with a simple records check.
Cases like Dewey's give the administration a concrete example to point to. A lawful permanent resident registered, certified citizenship under oath, voted, and was caught only after the fact. The administration's argument is straightforward: if states had real-time access to citizenship data, these registrations could be flagged and rejected before a ballot is ever cast.
Kansas is not the only state grappling with citizenship verification. Alaska recently flagged more than 3,000 voters for citizenship checks ahead of its August primary, a number that dwarfed routine totals and suggested that existing registration systems may not be catching ineligible applicants at the front end.
The scale of the problem remains contested. Critics of the administration's enforcement push argue that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare and that aggressive database matching risks purging eligible citizens from the rolls. Supporters counter that even a small number of illegal votes dilutes the franchise and that the Dewey case proves the existing honor system fails.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has signaled the DOJ's willingness to take the voter roll verification battle all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. That posture suggests the administration views the database access question as a constitutional priority, not a policy preference it will quietly abandon if lower courts push back.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed how Dewey's false citizenship claim was initially detected. Investigators have not said whether her registration was flagged by election officials during the provisional ballot review process or through a separate tip or database check.
It also remains unclear how long Dewey had been a lawful permanent resident before she registered to vote, or whether she had attempted to register or vote in any prior election. Those details could matter for both the immigration consequences she faces and for understanding whether this was a one-time act or part of a longer pattern.
The state charge she pleaded guilty to, disorderly election conduct, is a Kansas statute that covers a range of election violations. Investigators will need to determine whether federal prosecutors intend to bring separate charges for the false citizenship claim on the voter registration form, which carries its own penalties under federal law.
ICE's decision to take Dewey into custody after the state guilty plea raises a separate question: whether her conviction triggers removal proceedings. Lawful permanent residents can lose their green cards and face deportation for certain criminal convictions. Authorities have not publicly stated whether removal proceedings have been initiated.
The administration's critics will note that one provisional ballot in Sedgwick County did not change the outcome of any race. That is almost certainly true on the math. But the administration is not making a mathematical argument. It is making a structural one: that the system currently relies on self-certification, that self-certification failed here, and that the federal government should be allowed to give states the tools to verify before ballots are cast.
Dewey's case is now Exhibit A in that argument. She registered, swore she was a citizen, voted, and got caught only after the fact, through a process that remains publicly unexplained. The administration wants to replace that after-the-fact model with front-end verification, and it is willing to fight to the Supreme Court to get there.
When the system depends on the honor code to protect the ballot box, one guilty plea in Kansas is all it takes to prove the code is not enough.
